Seminar Series. Manu Prakash: Frugal Science & malaria (recorded)
The EPPIcenter is thrilled to host Stanford's Dr Manu Prakash, Associate Professor, Bioengineering, and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment.
Dr Prakash's lab uses interdisciplinary approaches (including theory and experiments) to understand how computation is embodied in biological matter. Examples include cognition in single cell protists and morphological computing in animals with no neurons and origins of complex behavior in multi-cellular systems. Broadly, they invent new tools for studying non-model organisms addressing fundamental questions such as how do cells sense pressure or gravity?
Significantly, the team is dedicated to inventing and distributing “frugal science” tools to democratize access to science. Innovations such as Foldscope & Abuzz have worldwide distribution. The EPPIcenter has longstanding relationships with the Prakesh lab, and has worked with them to to develop and test diagnostics of infectious and vector borne diseases like malaria, and shares an interest in leveraging global citizen science communities to tackle planetary scale environmental challenges such as mosquito surveillance.
The EPPIcenter is a research unit in UCSF's Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases & Global Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
